The Stone Killer (1973, dir. Michael Winner)

Charles Bronson in The Stone Killer, most likely trying to figure out Gerald Wilson's deliriously convoluted screenplay...

Another film watched over Christmas, Michael Winner's 1973 film is a rollicking big-budget exploitation picture with Bronson supplying serious star wattage. His Lou Torrey is short on subtleties, but the physicality of his performance is impressive, whether he's crashing his car through market stalls in pursuit of a motorcycle, or scrambling up staircases blasting everyone in sight. Gerald Wilson's screenplay had me tied up in knots from the get-go, and for the most part the film was barely comprehensible, but Winner knows how to deliver the thrills and spills and one can at least enjoy the breakneck outrageousness of it all. In fact the film is genuinely bizarre at times, as if two or three other films were intruding upon it, and afterwards I had to wonder if I did actually see a scene where Bronson visits an Easy Rider-style hippie commune (complete with camel) and did I really spot Angelo Rossitto perched on a hotel reception counter ? It seems I did...

Richard Burton on the joy of a book collection...

Found during a random page selection from the Richard Burton Diaries...

Saturday 4th October 1969

"Yesterday I spent most of the day unwrapping the books. By some lucky guess the bookshelves, measured by guesswork on my part, accommodate the books almost perfectly, leaving half a shelf spare for any additions that Dent-Dutton may dream up. Now comes the task, looked forward to, of putting them in order, either alphabetically or by subject matter. Alphabetically by authors is probably the most practical, though E would prefer them in colours. I protest that they will look like a pretty wall-paper, a decoration reminiscent of those shops in London where one goes in and orders two yards of books without knowing or caring what's inside them. We have mild side-bets as to who has the most volumes under his name. It's probably Dickens but there are a quite a few dark horses like Walter Scott, Gibbon and Grote (History of Greece). Shakespeare is in four volumes so he's out. The tomes are all beautifully bound in velvet green calf, red and blue calf, black and maroon morocco, grey calf. A sensuous delight just to hold and touch. There is a section for children, an encyclopedia, dictionaries of all kinds, history geography art science romances essays and all. The room when finished is going to be a dream and I shall probably spend most of my time there. There is a beautifully rough stone fireplace, log-burning, and the outside door leads directly into the garden. A couple of easy chairs, a small bar, a sofa, a desk and a chair and a couple of rugs thrown about the floor and a painting or two on the walls and you have the best cell ever for a literary man. It's so particularly delightful to have the time and the leisure (and the money) to do it without having to rush off in 10 days to do some ghastly film chore..."

Still watching the skies ?

 "I've been getting messages from outer space, they spiral like a finger in the sky" says the paranoid narrator of Yo La Tengo's song Deeper Into Movies... I've been listening to YLT's 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One this morning, and it's sent me down an unexpected path, looking at vintage UFO photographs. Not exactly a subject I'm terribly interested in (I've never seen an episode of the X Files), but like Ossian Brown's Haunted Air book, which collect old photographs of Halloween celebrations, some of these pictures have a genuinely eerie quality if one can look past the fakery. I wonder has the UFO subculture waned over the years, now that people are photographing and recording the world 24-7 with their phones ? I'm not looking to go down the rabbit hole of UFO Facebook groups and so on - these things become tedious very quickly, but I remember many years ago watching a program on one of Sky's public access channels about a UFO convention and it was weirdly fascinating to see so many nuts gathered in one place. Or perhaps, I misread the situation, and all these people were knowingly indulging in a fantasy. I'm not sure...

The Collection

Just over twenty years worth of film collecting in 2,400 lines... I finally completed updating my DVD/BR list for 2020, with the newest entry on the list, Arrow's pedal-to-the-metal turbo-charged BR edition of Crash closing out another excellent year of film collecting. We still haven't got BR editions of The Devils or Renaldo and Clara, but they will come... I'm something of a list junkie and I find keeping an inventory of my titles very beneficial, especially now that my collection is fairly large and sometimes difficult to keep a track of. A few years ago, I started compiling everything I have on an Excel spreadsheet, and it's proven very useful. On more than one occasion, it's saved me from buying a title I already own, such is my faltering memory, and the list also comes in handy for nights where I don't have a film in mind (I usually pick my film early in the day), and a quick stroll thru the list usually inspires something, and much more effective I find, than standing before a riot of spine names. If you want an alternative to logging your titles on a tracker program, and if you have access to Excel or one of the free Excel clones out there, it's something I'd recommend...

Bruce Wightman's Dracula

I rediscovered this drawing earlier this morning, found inside my copy of The Dracula Centenary Book (1987). This book was part of a clutch of books that have outlived their usefulness and were being relegated to the top shelf of a wardrobe to make space on my main bookcase. I only spotted the illustration by chance, as I flicked through the book one last time before it being put out of reach. I'm reminded that my annual reading of Stoker's novel (which I've done these past 4 years) and my intention to read it back to back with the Icelandic Powers of Darkness variant never happened this year, like so many things planned at the top of the year. So, it rolls over to 2021, and as soon as I finish the Titanic book, I will pick up Joseph O'Connor's novel Shadowplay which reimagines the relationship between Stoker and Henry Irving. Things to look forward to…

Swastika Girl

British quad for Lili Marleen, Fassbinder’s 1981 film, another gorgeous piece of artwork by the great Tom Chantrell. I spotted a very affordable copy of this poster last week on eBay and almost pulled the trigger on it, but ultimately let it slip in a final moment of indecision - I don’t have the wall space to display it, and perhaps the swastika and suspenders are just a little too provocative for something that would be seen by visitors. I popped back onto eBay this evening in the hope that it was still there, but of course it’s gone. Hanna Schygulla looks fabulous here, and I love the 80’s flavor of the illustration, the Warlord-style blasting tanks, and there’s a nice bit of British video history courtesy of the Alpha logo on the bottom left. The film was released on VHS the following year on Alpha’s Intervision label.

Barbarella

Watched and filed away for another 20 years... Some talk of Jane Fonda on FB earlier prompted a revisit of Roger Vadim’s 1968 film, a film I have not seen since the early days of DVD, and perhaps with good reason - apart from the joy of watching Fonda at her loveliest, the film seems a waste of talent: Vadim’s direction is pedestrian, Terry Southern’s script is unfunny, the production design by the same man who designed The Leopard is unattractive, Marcel Marceau’s given nothing interesting to do, and Anita Pallenberg loses her voice to an indifferent dub job. I wonder what a great stylist like Mario Bava or Fellini might have done with the film - an injection of Sayricon weirdness would have helped. Everyone knows Duran Duran lifted their name from the film, but I’m assuming Drew Daniel’s Matmos did likewise...

On A Sea of Glass

Currently reading this detailed and comprehensive 2012 account of the life and death of the Titanic… In contrast to so many other Titanic reports, where the first few days of the voyage are merely a preamble before the disaster, Tad Fitch and his co-authors have furnished the book with so much fascinating detail about ship’s business and its passengers, that one wishes the Atlantic crossing had been longer. This is a Titanic presented with all its imperfections – behind the grand opulence of the first class spaces, there was unfinished décor and incomplete fixtures and fittings throughout the ship, and a malfunctioning heating system that had passengers shivering in their beds. There’s a wealth of compelling detail about some of the 2,240 souls on board the ship, from industrial magnates returning from holidays in Europe and Africa, newly weds on their honeymoon, and Irish and European emigrants seeking opportunity and adventure in the New World. There were disgruntled passengers, like the mother and daughter who complained incessantly to the stewards about their genuinely cramped 2nd class accommodation, and there was the poor woman who slipped on a wet staircase on her first day and broke her arm. There were seasick passengers that never made it to the dining hall, and travelers whose nerves could not be calmed by the flat sea and the oft repeated assurances that the ship was “unsinkable”.

At the point in the book where I am, the eve of the disaster, the fate of these people has yet to be determined. One crew member mentioned in the book, and I find myself frequently thinking about him, is one John Coffey, a 23 year old Irish engineer who accompanied the ship from Southampton to Cobh, and there jumped ship for reasons unclear – perhaps he had some premonition of disaster (as did many on board the ship, after Titanic almost collided with another ship as she left Southampton) or perhaps he simply wanted to get home to Cobh and stay there. But what of that extraordinary moment when he first heard about the disaster ? One could scarcely imagine having that much luck…

A dream of Dune

Some Moebius landscapes to get lost in... The new Dune film will be here soon I'm told (in a theatre/living room near you), but I'm not expecting much - the trailer makes it look like one of the recent Star Wars films, and I didn't much like Blade Runner 2049 either. Instead I'll grumpily cling to my utopian dream of Dune as a multi-million dollar, internationally produced, 5-hour animated film based on the design work of Team Jodorowsky: Moebius, Giger and Chris Foss. This will mean I’ll have to sacrifice my dream casting of Donald Trump as the Baron Harkonnen, but God, wouldn't it be great to be excited again by the promise of a huge animated sci-fi fantasy a la Akira back in the day ?

I've been listening to the Dune soundtrack this morning, that strange nexus where Toto, David "Pop the Cow" Lynch (as he's referred to in the dedications on the album), the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Brian Eno meet. The author of the soundtrack's Wiki entry states Eno composed the Prophecy Theme for the film, but to me it sounds like music that was originally recorded for the Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks album, and later donated to Dune - it could certainly be used in any given moment during For All Mankind. The Wiki entry also says Eno "is rumored to have composed an entire earlier Dune soundtrack" which sounds rather fanciful - at least I've never heard of any such thing elsewhere...

I Played Misty For Me

I watched Play Misty For Me last night courtesy of Universal’s UK Blu-Ray, and am pleased that this is finally in the collection, reclaimed after too many truncated, indifferent TV screenings over the years. Seeing the film again in better circumstances, made it feel a lot fresher than I might have given it credit for in the past – the film has arguably been displaced within popular film culture by Fatal Attraction, but Misty remains a disarmingly visceral thriller and, notwithstanding the gothic shadings of The Beguiled and High Plains Drifter, the closest Eastwood has come to crafting a contemporary Horror film. I had actually forgotten that Misty was Eastwood’s directorial debut (Don Siegel’s bartender will do that) and the film is an impressive calling card, especially that spectacular helicopter shot that opens the picture. Some judicious editing would have improved the film, the picture is weighed down by an unnecessary amount of footage of Carmel, as if Eastwood was too much in love with Bruce Surtees’ landscape shots to cast them aside - I spotted one shot of waves battering the coastline that has a near imperceptible jump cut, suggesting some kind of 11th hour pruning. I’m tempted to imagine the contrasting locations were a metaphor for the two woman at the centre of the film – Donna Mills reflecting the safe, pastoral wilderness, and Jessica Walter, the tempestuous, relentless Pacific ocean, but perhaps in the end it’s all just pretty window dressing. On the other hand, the on-the-fly footage from the Monterey Jazz Festival, though rather superfluous to the plot is a real treat, and I was pleased to spot the great Joe Zawinul with the Cannonball Adderley band. My Blu-Ray edition is completely barebones (“not even a trailer” as they say!), and in the absence of Tim Lucas’ acclaimed 2020 commentary track on the Kino BR, and the contextual material that was available on previous DVD editions, I turned to Patrick McGilligan’s 1999 Eastwood biography earlier and I’m reminded of what an unpleasant read it is…

Harold Budd (1936 - 2020)

Very sad this morning to hear the news that Harold Budd has passed away. I’m not normally moved by the death of artists and such, but throughout this awful year I frequently turned to Harold Budd’s music to lift the spirits during moments when I carried a heavy heart. His gorgeous, dreamy music, his distinctive piano sound (as recognizable as Coltrane’s brassy tone) gave me considerable comfort when I felt anxious and afraid. So today, I will be listening to his albums and reflecting on his work and thanking him for creating a space to catch a breath to take shelter from the noise.

What’s Welsh for sinister ?

Friday the 13th came up in conversation last night and John Cale’s wearing of a white hockey mask in the latter half of the 70’s came to mind. I made a note to consult my copy of Cale’s 1999 autobiography What’s Welsh for Zen to find out the origin of the hockey mask, but disappointingly it gets only a cursory mention when Cale describes his idea for wearing costumes on stage to deepen the meaning of his songs. Tim Lucas suggested to me that Cale adopted the hockey mask after it made the front page of one of the American news weeklies, and I’ll go with that. I’m pleased to pick up the book again, not having looked at my copy in years, and I’m reminded of what a striking book it is, with the text laid over and meshing with photos, drawings and distressed image and typographic effects, as eccentric and erratic as Cale’s long discography. Looking for a mention of the damned hockey mask, I find myself drawn back into the book, as my eye scans over fascinating remarks about Eno, Lou Reed and quite candid revelations about his stormy, even harrowing marriage to Cynthia Wells of the GTOs...

René and Sara

I watched Don Siegel's 1970 picture Two Mules for Sister Sara on Friday night, and it's always nice to see a familiar name among the production credits - in this case look out for René Cardona's second unit director credit, a nice bit of work after Night of the Bloody Apes. When Iver Film Services released Apes on video in the UK in 1983, I think they missed a trick by not including on the sleeve the hype blurb "From the director of Two Mules for Sister Sara". Who knows, it might have saved the film from the DPP's eccentric selection of titles...

George Harrison's Electronic Sound

First album of the day, and it's turned my home office (ie. my kitchen table) into the Bell Labs, with the sounds of electronic birdsong, white noise and space-age whooshes drifting in from the living room. I watched Four Flies on Grey Velvet last week, and positioned prominently in the background of several scenes is George Harrison's 3rd album All Things Must Pass. I made a mental note to grab Harrison's album off the shelf, but this morning, in the mood for adventure, I pulled out instead, Harrison's 1969 album Electronic Sound. Putting aside the thorny question of the exact authorship of the pieces on the album, which Beatles writer Kevin Howlett addresses in the liner notes of the excellent 2014 reissue, the music here is utterly fantastic, and in places bridges the gap between the Barron’s alien soundscapes of Forbidden Planet and the free-form atonalities of early Throbbing Gristle. It’s a shame the album still remains unloved and neglected to this day.

Mank (2020, dir. David Fincher)

I watched Mank on last night and if ever a film should have been dedicated to Pauline Kael, it was this one. For the most part I enjoyed David Fincher’s film, but it fell well short of greatness, and in its own humble way, the 1999 film RKO 128 was a superior take on the making of Citizen Kane. Fincher’s film is well written and acted, but I was less pleased with his decision to shoot the picture in b/w, wishing instead he had homaged John Alonzo’s work on Chinatown rather than Gregg Toland’s on Kane. I visited the Hearst Castle in 2006, and my memory of the property, with its eccentric collection of bric-a-brac, is indelibly bathed in California sunshine, so much so, that when I saw it recreated in monochrome for the film, it felt like a stylistic overdrive. And the cue marks, charming in the first instance, became annoying after the third or fourth appearance - it’s as if David Fincher was treating American Cinema from this era as a sort of quaint museum piece. Also, I didn’t much like how the character of Louis B. Mayer was played, as a sort of diminutive cretin with a particularly sour look on his face, but perhaps I’m thinking too much of Michael Lerner’s studio boss in Barton Fink, who I think personified best the flashy studio-era movie mogul gangster…

Xmas AD: The 2000AD Annual

Christmas presents secured - check. Decorations retrieved from the darkest recesses of the attic - check. 2000AD annuals - CHECK !!! A December tradition I try to keep every year is taking some time to flick thru my remaining 2000ADs annuals - the galaxy’s greatest annual, which was always a huge part of Christmases-past. Reading David Bishop's 2009 book Thrill-Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000AD, I was dismayed to find out that the annual was a thorn in the side of the 2000AD staff, a hastily assembled rag tag collection of old strip reprints, short stories, wordsearch puzzles and quizzes, reader drawings and in the early annuals, Tomorrow's World style features on space travel, VCRs and home computers. All grist to the mill for this young earthling.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, dir. Dario Argento)

Four Flies on Grey Velvet came up in conversation a few days ago and my failure to say anything about this film prompted me to revisit Argento’s third film last night. My previous screening of the film was in 2009, when the botched MYA DVD first hit the street, so last night’s screening, courtesy of the German Koch Media Blu-Ray was long overdue. Sadly though, my inability to comment on the film was not so much down to my faltering memory, unreliable as it is, but the fact that Four Flies on Grey Velvet is rather dull and unengaging. Not having seen the film in over a decade I couldn’t recall going in who was tormenting Michael Brandon’s character and quite honestly, I gave up guessing about midway through, such was the insipid storyline and the leaden pacing - the suspense sequences in particular seem to take an age to unfold. Four Flies is a sort of oddball film at this point in Argento’s career, and it feels very self-conscious in a few respects. There’s some very show-off subjective camerawork as if Argento was flexing his muscles in an increasingly crowded murder-thriller genre that had found inspiration in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. And there’s some dismal comedy as if the director was deliberately trying to shake off expectations set by his two previous thrillers. The comedy would find greater expression in the sabbatical that was The Five Days of Milan, and if one follows the sequence of films, Four Flies…Five Days; Deep Red looks ever more like Argento’s great comeback film. Four Flies is probably a more enjoyable film to discuss than to watch, and there are ideas and elements in the film that would resonate for years to come across Argento’s work, even as far in to the future as Opera, and for that alone, the film remains an essential collector’s item.

Frightmare (1974, dir. Pete Walker)

I watched Pete Walker’s 1974 film last night, ahead of reading about the film in Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic, and thinking about Kim Butcher’s Debbie - British Cinema’s worst JD, M. Emmett Walsh’s line in Blade Runner came to mind: “Talk about beauty and the beast... she’s both”. In a film where all the principle characters are falling inexorably into a black hole, the directionless Debbie at least discovers her true calling in life, albeit to the whirling sound of a black and decker power drill.

Revisiting Frightmare after some years, I was surprised by the sheer nihilism of the film, and no doubt Pete Walker and David McGillivray delighted in sending audiences shuffling up the aisle of the cinema in awkward silence at the film's merciless climax. And speaking of awkward silences, seeing the film again remined me of a feature in the Spring '93 issue of UK quarterly fanzine Monstroid, containing a report from the Festival of Fantastic Films, held in Manchester the previous year. The organizers had come up with the brazen idea of reuniting Pete Walker and David McGillivray for a Q&A – brazen because both men had at that time not spoken to each other in 12 years, their partnership ending acrimoniously after Schizo. According to Paul Higson’s account it was a tension-filled night, with both men throwing jibes at one another, and Walker losing his cool at one point over a disputed claim in David McGillivray’s 1992 book Doing Rude Things that Walker’s films lost money. “I never said that” offered McGillivray, to which Walker, finally losing his cool, screamed: “YOU DID!” I wonder did Pete Walker and David McGillivray speak since ?